A Free Left Blog

One of my favourite lines is from the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin: “My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say.” I reckon you could write a book on that sentence alone. There is so much in it and so much it can be applied to. It immediately makes me think of someone talking confidently, perhaps on TV, maybe with a presenter deferring to them as an expert. They feel comfortable, at ease, and this is reflected in their voice, which is clear, calm and authoritative. In order to get on to the sofa in the first place, their voice probably had to sound this way. In order to enter into the situation of being deferred to, to be treated as an authority in front of millions of people, they had to look and sound the part of someone who knows what’s going on. They had to fit in with this sort of situation of people who go on TV and talk confidently about things. There is a sort of unity in this situation: of the authoritative voice matching up with t...

These days I am often reminded of a scene from the film The Godfather Part II. Al Pacino’s character Michael Corleone is in Cuba for a meeting of gang and business bosses to divide up the spoils of corrupt deals with the Batista government. Driving around the island he sees a number of Castro rebels being arrested, one of whom breaks away and kills himself and a military police captain with a grenade. In relating the episode to fellow bosses, Michael says this tells him something about the rebels, that “they can win”. The fact that the rebels were motivated enough to die for their cause showed that they could prevail over a regime that had to pay its people to fight. (One of the other business-crime bosses present by contrast dismisses them as ‘lunatics’. Shortly afterwards the Batista regime crumbles and Fidel Castro takes over.) In Downing Street yesterday, Theresa May as Prime Minister gave one of those speeches that are becoming familiar to us and also to her and t...

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our system of diversity is the way feminists and Islamists avoid directly confronting each other. Their ideologies are utterly opposed to each other, but within the system they are allies, so maintain distance and attack others. We can see this in how feminists resolutely avoid picking up on specifically Islamic-related instances of actual misogyny and discrimination in action. They nearly always stick to generalities and abstractions about the world or society as a whole, as Fawcett Society chief executive Sam Smethers does in telling Owen Jones that , “We have a very misogynistic culture in the UK.” In this version of reality, there is a single culture – or at least all the cultures we have come from the same root - and it is ‘very misogynistic’. This is the ‘patriarchy’ theory that is remarkably popular in the upper echelons of the liberal-left, just as it is among young feminists coming out of their Gender Studies courses at universit...

Sadiq Khan is playing the race card again, this time in his campaign to be Labour’s candidate for London Mayor. Khan, who managed Ed Miliband’s successful Labour leadership campaign in 2010, was talking to George Eaton of the New Statesman about fellow candidate Tessa Jowell, and said: “I don’t think [Jowell’s] got the answers for the 2020s, the future business, we’re a modern city, we’re young, we’re diverse.” Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting. We can see here that Khan thinks Tessa Jowell hasn’t got the answers and shouldn’t be Major in part because she isn't 'diverse'. He contrasts her to a ‘we’ which is ‘diverse’, as well as modern, young and of the future . It illustrates once more how this notion of diversity in the hands of left-wingers actually often excludes white people. On the left it's one of those words that actually means something different from its literal meaning; often only those who are attuned to the language can pick up the differenc...

‘Segregation’ is quite an emotive word, especially now with thoughts of Nelson Mandela and apartheid fresh in our minds. But segregation in practice isn’t such a simple issue as many people make out. A report from Universities UK offering guidance on how to deal with external speakers has ignited quite a storm over the issue of segregation, specifically over a hypothetical case study example of   a religious speaker wishing for his event to be segregated according to gender. It’s probably worth quoting the scenario (not quite in full): “A representative of an ultra-orthodox religious group has been invited to speak at an event to discuss faith in the modern world. The event is part of four different speeches taking place over the course of a month exploring different approaches to religion. The initial speaker request has been approved but the speaker has since made clear that he wishes for the event to be segregated according to gender. The event organiser has ...